January 2014

“In the next issue of IAMwe will be publishing an article by Kent Richardson and Erik Oliver, of ROL Group, which looks at 186 patent packages – consisting of a total of 5,394 issued US patents and 7,595 total patent assets worldwide – offered by brokers and other sellers over the past three years. Richardson and Oliver write:

Our analysis is based on a sample of the market, not the entire market. We estimate that while running buying programmes, we saw somewhere between 35% and 75% of the available packages, depending on the time and the particular project. Also, because of our clients’ locations, we tended to see more US-focused transactions. We have excluded some of very large deals that had over 200 patents or were not widely distributed, even though brokers may have been involved from our analysis, in order to provide decision makers with clear insights about the characteristics of the pool of packages that are readily available. Even with these notes, we believe that our data is sufficient to draw conclusions about the market.”

While the brokered patent market in the United States is going strong, there is still little analysis of this business. Our review of 222 deals offers insight into what is becoming a lucrative market. Here, we present our analysis of the brokered patent market in 2013.